Fresh from a $19 billion deal with WhatsApp, Mark Zuckerberg addressed the Mobile World Congress last night and discussed a number of his ongoing projects including Internet.org.
Internet.org is the coming together of digital giants with the aim of delivering some form of internet access to everyone on the planet. Zuckerberg explained how Internet.org are already working on plans to make this happen, but said he understood this would not be an short term project.
He went on to explain how the cost of the infrastructure needed to deliver internet access is one of the largest barriers to rolling out basic service around the world.
Zuckerberg explained the need for increasing mobile data efficiency and gave an example of how Facebook made this happen. This time last year the Facebook mobile app used, on average, 14MB of data a day. Today, that is down to 2MB a day and they aim to bring that down again.
When asked about WhatsApp, Zuckerberg was very complimentary about his latest purchase:
"By itself, I think WhatsApp is worth more than 19 billion dollars."
He then continued to discuss what WhatsApp will get from the deal - apart from the $19 billion:
"By being a part of Facebook for the next 5 years or so, WhatsApp can focus on reaching out or more people."
Towards the end of the keynote, a number of questions were asked of Zuckerberg by journalists in the room. One of the journalists asked if data sent via WhatsApp would be stored and used by Facebook to which the billionaire replied a flat out no.
"The vision is to keep the service exactly the same as it now. WhatsApp does not store your data and will not."
You can watch the full keynote here:
Our coverage of Mobile World Congress comes with thanks to Carphone Warehouse. You can follow the full day's events at #MWC14 here.
